Preview display freezing while playing

[Davidk]

Yes, I read that thread about CUDA recently. Interesting lapse by Corel. Particularly as the incidence of multi-core processors has become common, and the adaptation of applications programming to take advantage of it has been tardy. At one time - only 4 years ago - performance management tools were saying that in a typical 2 or 4 core cpu, only one core was being used at any specific moment. What a waste of computing power. That's changing, and I've noticed it in various software apps I use.

One of the things I did on my desktop to try and track the cause of this 'pause then resume' issue down was to replace the "on motherboard" display controller with a separate display card - an NVIDIA 9500GT, in fact. The amount of display memory is about the same, but it's all on the card now, which means about 500Mb RAM previously used for that is back in the main pool. I haven't had the pause issue on the desktop since, but I have not worked much with USB memory files since then either, and it's the usb storage of video files in use that's common.

Ordinarily, hardware acceleration occurs to embed routines previously done in software into dedicated hardware chips. Speed increase - around 3-5x. And generally its all to do with the display, which means that on a laptop (or tablet or surface) it's pretty hard to add-on a separate display card. And thus the edit function, since edit is almost all to do with display. How the rest works - seems to be a bit of smoke and mirrors. Performance optimising some software components is doable - but it needs conversion from easily written high level code to a more difficult and time-intensive assembler-like version: the latter might use about one-hundredth of the execution cycles that the compiled hi-level language does, and thus the speed in execution significantly rises. This sort of improvement however needs tools to identify which sections of code are most used and thus would give significant improvement for the conversion effort involved, and thus almost always (99.999%) occurs in the development lab, not on your friendly user's desktop or laptop. Otherwise, a RAM cache seems like the only alternative, but the memory for cache is always limited.

I've even contemplated trying out a proxy approach - which got no further than the check box in the preferences that said basically usable only for images denser than standard. And the effect I'm experiencing occurs with standard resolution imagery.

The nagging thing about this 'pause and resume' is that I've been using the laptop for VS class work for 18 months now, and I've only recently noticed this - which suggests that in an update something changed to give this effect. Noticeable when it happens - and leave it alone for about 10 sec and it catches up with itself, which suggests that a function of some sort is delaying things. Seen when editing a project file contents (eg, overlay clips and text titles, and moving the mouse simply has no or limited display effect: 2 days ago, I could move the pointer sideways within a music track item but not jump tracks from music to titles) or just playing it in the preview window. Which downright irritating

Davidk